Maison Margiela RTW Spring 2024

Lily Templeton
·2 min read
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The ghostly green outline of an ocean liner blinking in and out of view in the lobby of Maison Margiela’s headquarters set the scene for a prequel to the chronicles of Count and Hen, the protagonists of “Cinema Inferno.”

Strains of a piano-cello duet performing Ludvig van Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathétique,” immediately put HBO’s “Succession” in mind, foreshadowing the central theme of the spring: transmission.

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Upstairs, the runway show portrayed the characters’ parents, meeting for the first time during their passage to America.

“One, the son of an impoverished aristocratic line; the other, the daughter of an industrial family of pretence,” the show notes described.

Maison Margiela creative director John Galliano offered a poignant tale impeccable in its execution, a standout moment in a season of too realistic proposals, building a collection from “the voyage’s steely climate, its characters and a cargo loaded with traveling trunks full of clothes, which will ultimately end up in the adaptive hands of their future descendants.”

The characters start out smartly turned out in their early 20th-century wardrobes as they set on a collision course. The dominant somber palette telegraphed a rational pairing rather than romantic entanglements.

Gradually, things loosened. Drapes and creases were laminated to mimick clothes packed too long. Sections of a skirt’s hemline held by tape, or parts of a bustier being shorn away or folded down looked like on-the-go customization. Gendered outfits came to bleed into one another, as elements were repurposed.

By the time the voyage through the spring lineup ended, he’s in culottes with turned-up hems so generous they ended up looking like a ruffled skort, and she’s is in a monastic cape dress, suggesting an accord.

Worn indifferently by male and female models, and with genders cast adrift by each model’s gait — dainty and precious for a female vibe, taciturn and stooping for a male take — the clothes suggested throwing the rule book overboard. That’s a course Maison Margiela and Galliano have both long been charting, to great effect.

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Launch Gallery: Maison Margiela RTW Spring 2024

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